


the unsteady course

by newsbypostcard



Series: Blood From Bony Fingers [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, M/M, Politics, Time Travel Fallout
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-23 00:34:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13178559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/newsbypostcard
Summary: "No," Bucky says. "For the sake of those crazy bastards who'll someday be us, we steady the course. That means we go to war and we get our asses frozen into the future, and we wind up there for better or for worse. And if we want to wind up theretogether, then we changenothing, you understand? No matter what we think we can avoid, we can't wind up avoidingthis, avoidingus..."Bucky trails off there. Steve thinks, not for the first time, that Bucky knows something he's not letting on.-In 1936, Bucky and Steve try to make sense of their futures.





	the unsteady course

**Author's Note:**

> It is not _entirely_ necessary to have read [wash the blood from your bony fingers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8875549) to understand this fic, but it'll definitely help. The gist of that fic is: first Steve, then Bucky, were de-aged in 2018 to their 18- and 19-year-old forms. Small Steve argued with Big Bucky, Small Bucky argued with Big Steve, eventually everyone went home—and then it turned out that, in 1936, both Steve and Bucky remembered their time in 2018. 
> 
> This fic starts off where we last left Steve and Bucky in 1936, newly a couple and trying to figure out how to live their lives now that they know what's coming. They know war is looming, they know they get frozen and shot into the future, they know they wind up together, and they know Bucky loses an arm. They also have some general information about 2018, like that gay marriage is legal in the US.
> 
> This fic is basically canon divergence, but it takes until Chapter 2 to really get there. Chapter 1 mostly reads like your typical prewar fic with the according concerns—self-sacrifice, Steve being sick, the pressures of the era, etc.—plus a few extra little tidbits.

  


  


### 1936

In the days after they return from the future, they spend a lot of time in Steve's bed just trying to make sense of it all.

"So you and me... we never actually left the '30s," Steve says again.

"Nope," says Bucky.

"Do you think it was real?"

Bucky sighs a little. His fingers tighten where they're meshed between Steve's. "Two matching perspectives hard to discredit."

"Well, we were never actually in the same place at the same time."

"Sam?" he says. "Natasha? Wanda? Stark Jr.?"

Steve shuts his eyes. "Right."

"Either it's real, or we're both crazy."

"Isn't us being crazy the more likely scenario?"

"Maybe."

They sit through a long pause.

"So… what now?" asks Steve.

"Well… we could fool around again."

Steve smiles. "You know what I mean."

"Not sure that I do."

"You know, do we… do something? I dunno, to try to change how the future—"

Bucky grunts in realization. "No."

"But—"

"No _but_. Jesus. Are you out of your mind? It has to happen the way it happened. That's what _you_ told me, when you were big, and it's how we meet up again besides, so we can't just _change_ —"

"But maybe I was wrong."

Bucky stops mid-tirade and leers over him on the bed, slow, propped on an elbow. "I'm sorry, Rogers," he says, voice buttery smooth. "I must've misheard. Say again?"

Steve rolls his eyes. "Nevermind."

"Did I hear you say you were _wrong_?"

"I said _maybe_ I was wrong, first of all, and second of all, was that even me? That shiny ape wearing my face may not have the same pristine judgment I so clearly bring to my daily life—"

"Oh, brother."

"—so I'm just saying there's some room for negotiation on what we think of as the facts."

"No there's not. There's no room."

"But Bucky—"

" _No_ but Bucky."

"—you've already _changed_ what happened. When you said to me..."

Bucky exhales hard as he throws himself onto his back, not moving for a long time. Steve waits with him, watching him breathe. "I wasn't gonna make it a year without you, Rogers," Bucky finally murmurs. "Moving something up isn't the same as changing history."

It's still a little foreign, being able to reach out to Bucky and feel him right there. Steve slides his fingers against Bucky's palm and Bucky holds their hands in the air, his wrist bending until his fingers find Steve's. They watch together as Bucky meshes their fingers flush.

"You love me," Steve accuses.

"You're alright," Bucky admits.

"Now don't you think we should try to—"

" _No._ "

"It just—"

"Steve," Bucky sighs, letting their hands fall. When Bucky turns his head to look at him, all Steve sees is raw apprehension. "Don't," he says. "Just stop. The ape with your face just finished convincing me that it _has_ to be this way, that it goes the way it goes; and the way it goes is that we land in a better future where you're not sick and two men can get married. Now you're trying to convince me to abandon all that because of… what? Your _whims_?" 

"I just mean—"

"No," Bucky says. "For the sake of those crazy bastards who'll someday be us, we steady the course. That means we go to war and we get our asses frozen into the future, and we wind up there for better or for worse. And if we want to wind up there _together_ , then we change _nothing_ , you understand? No matter what we think we can avoid, we can't… we can't wind up avoiding _this_ , avoiding _us_. Don't…"

Bucky trails off there. Steve thinks, not for the first time, that Bucky knows something he's not letting on. 

"What aren't you telling me?" he asks, quiet.

"Just… promise me." Bucky twists their hands hard together where they're still intertwined. Steve's sure he doesn't mean to hurt him; it's just anguish made manifest. "Don't deny me that. Can you please—"

Steve watches him a long while, dread thrumming through his veins. Bucky never looks at him. He just looks at the ceiling, the force of his pulse making his whole body move in the evening light.

"Okay," Steve says softly. He presses a soft thumb at his clavicle, stroking there until the tension sloughs off those perfect shoulders. "Alright, Buck."

Bucky looks about as terrified as he ever has of anything, eyes wide and sparkling in the dim light of the room. "I don't want to jeopardize a damn thing about you," Bucky murmurs. "You get me?"

"I get you," Steve replies; and then he kisses him, soft, until Bucky rolls on top of him and presses against him with each and every ounce of that encompassing weight.

  


  


  


### 1937

"Don't look so cheerful," Steve wheezes, and then loses the next two minutes of his life to a protracted coughing fit.

Bucky merely kicks his feet up on the edge of Steve's hospital bed as he chews his contraband tobacco and looks so deceptively at ease that Steve's almost convinced there's nothing wrong with him at all. "Just know you're gonna get out of this, is all," Bucky says, once Steve gets his breath back. 

"Ma would've killed you," Steve replies, and then takes a second to get air in his lungs, "if she knew you were chewing tobacco in here."

"Shame she's not around," Bucky says, pretending to read his newspaper. "Guess you'll have to make do with the nurse you got."

"You're not my—"

"You're stuck with me, alright. We get out of here, I'll dress up for you to prove it."

And Bucky does look briefly concerned when Steve can't breathe for laughter in his confusion, but for the most part he finds Bucky's confidence means something. It's a lot easier, after all, to visualize getting himself out of hospital when Bucky believes so strongly that he will. It's hard not to feel like he's eminently taken care of. What had the other Bucky said…? _I'm not gonna let anything happen to you_ —leaning in, looking so broad, with too much hair and a metal arm, that edge of cynicism sharp on his face. Skeptic and all, Bucky had still believed that—that he could stop anything bad from happening to him. Steve finds it hard not to believe himself.

This Bucky, with barely a trace of cynicism in him, reads the newspaper beside him and quietly believes the same thing. He's not brave enough to voice it, but Steve feels it as strongly as when he was. 

Steve loves him, quietly, then finds his attention drawn stubbornly to the front page. "Wait, what's happening in Spain?"

"DiMaggio apparently replaced his bat with a 36."

"Bucky—Yugoslavia _what_ now?"

"What d'you reckon it'd take to run every 36 oz. bat in the city through a chipper? Think we could manage that in a night?" He doesn't even look up from his page. Steve clicks his tongue in exasperation. 

"The news doesn't stop happening just because you pretend it does, Bucky."

"It stops happening long enough for you to focus on getting out of here if I say it does, though," he replies, and he sets his leg against the sole of Steve's foot and reads him only the sports stats until the nurses kick him out.

  


  


  


### 1938

"What if," Bucky says, one night not long after Austria is absorbed into Germany.

But he stops there. Silence draws into horrible tension. Steve pretends not to know what Bucky's talking about, even though just from that—from the way Bucky's been staring at the ceiling with the paper folded on his chest, not saying a word for the last twenty minutes—Steve knows what he's doubting. Lately, at every mention of war, Bucky's gaze has settled on Steve as though trying to figure something out, trying to fuse apprehension and belief together until he figures out what to do.

The more the war becomes inevitable, the more Steve finds himself thinking the same things. Something _must_ be avoidable. Bucky doesn't need to become that shrewd cynic, the calculating soldier Steve had seen sitting around that conference table talking to Sam about a war that never really came to end. He doesn't have to become the kind of man who'd subject a suspect to "interrogation" just to turn Steve back into the version of himself that could fight back a little better. All Steve would have to do is...

 _What if,_ he thinks.

Broad Bucky had even suggested no better fate awaits him. _You've been through too much, Rogers—_ hadn't he said? _I'd never put you through it again._

Steve sees it in Bucky's eyes, in _what if_ moments like these, all the things Bucky won't tell him about and wants to save him from.

"Steady the course, Buck," Steve says in reply. The lie of it sits bitter on his tongue.

Bucky sighs at the ceiling and picks the paper up again. "Yeah," he says emptily, and disappears behind the front page again. "You're right, Rogers. Of course you are."

  


  


  


### 1939

Bucky comes home too early and catches him red-handed. 

Steve stands there in the doorway, hating them both. He should've left earlier. He's too sick to be going anywhere, Bucky will say; his jacket's too threadbare for weather like this. He'd been bedridden for days before he'd gotten up this morning, but the sign slung over his shoulder that he made himself says far more than the persistent wheeze in his chest: _NO PLACE FOR NAZIS,_ with a cartoon of Uncle Sam kicking a man in a Nazi uniform halfway across the sign. 

Bucky only needs a few seconds to take the scene in before he shakes his head and hoists Steve wordlessly back inside.

"Hey!" Steve objects, fighting free of Bucky's grip at his collar. "Let go of me!"

But Bucky's beyond reason. He's entered a rare state of silent authority, one that leaves Steve agitated and spitting mad. "You're not going," Bucky says.

"Fuck you," Steve spits. For Bucky to presume he knows what's right! Who does he think he is—

"Drop it," Bucky says, abominably calm. "Drop the sign, drop the act, drop your coat. Take off your shoes and stay a while, Steve, I'm making dinner."

"Not for me you're not." Steve tries to duck around him, but Bucky sees it coming and catches him easy.

"Goddamned blunderbuss," Bucky hisses, pushing him back with the full force of his strength. "Sit _down_."

" _You_ sit down!" Steve shouts at him. "And you can go to hell while you're at it! I'm showing up at this thing, Bucky, and if you're anything worth your salt you'll keep your boots on and come with me."

"What _thing_? What hell on earth are you walking into now?"

Steve pulls a flyer out of his pocket. "It's no 'Pro-American' rally, I'll tell you that much," he says, when Bucky stares at it too long. "You know what it is just the same as I do. These are Nazis congregating—"

"You don't know that."

"I surely do. It's hundreds, maybe thousands of people across the city going to this thing just to say terrible things about… about our neighbours, about the President, about Jews, about... _us_ , Bucky. You want me to just sit down—"

"Steve."

"We have to _do_ something. This is Hydra. _This_ —" He points at the door, and if there's a flicker of sympathy on Bucky's face at the break in his voice, Steve doesn't have time for it. "This is what we've been fighting. This is what we're about to fight. We have a chance to get a jump on it, right now, you and me—"

"Sit down. You're swaying on the spot."

"I won't. These are the people who would do all that to you, Bucky, these are the people—"

Bucky's eyes shoot up, pressing thin. "Excuse me? Do _what_ , exactly? You don't know the first thing about—"

"All those things you're not telling me!" Steve shouts. His throat's still raw from being sick and sounds it, but he doesn't care. "How you lose your arm, how you become so… so _whatever_ it is that makes you the kind of man who can stare down a war without so much as flinching at what it throws your way. Whatever it is that makes you so afraid. Bucky—they _did this_ to you. Now are you just gonna sit here and wait for it to come, or are you gonna step up and—"

But Steve manages to stop himself at the look on Bucky's face, at the way his chest heaves with thin, shallow drags. Whatever Bucky's feeling, Steve doesn't know it. He doesn't recognize it. He feels sure he never wants to see it on Bucky's face again.

"I'm not gonna go out and look for it, either," Bucky says. Steve thinks he might be so quiet just trying to mask the waver in his voice.

"I'm not looking for it. I'm trying to _fight_ —"

"You're fighting the flu is what you're fighting. It's below freezing out there—"

"They don't care about any of that. Why should we?"

Bucky clicks his tongue. "What would your mother say?"

"She's dead, Bucky. You wanna play that card, you better come with me to make sure they don't carry me off after I pass out, the way she would've done if she knew damn well I was gonna go regardless."

Bucky shakes his head at him. His fist clenches white around the keys in his hand. "You think one guy protesting twenty thousand people is gonna stop this tide?" he mutters through his teeth.

That, finally, gives Steve pause. He blinks, stepping back. "Wh— _how_ many?"

Bucky sets his jaw and doesn't go on. Steve's budding with questions. Had Bucky known this rally was happening all along? " _Twenty thousand_?" he asks again.

"That's the rumour."

"Where did you hear a rumour like that?"

He doesn't say anything, but Steve can tell Bucky has more information than he wants to let on.

"Can Madison Square Garden even hold that much?" Steve asks.

"Easy."

"Well... I'm not the only one going. I wouldn't go by myself, Buck. Even I'm not that stupid."

"That right?" Bucky says, leading. "How many are gonna be there?"

"I—I dunno. Thirty, forty from around here, maybe."

"Thirty or forty. Against twenty thousand."

"I never heard twenty thousand."

"I'm saying I did."

"That supposed to change my mind?"

Bucky shakes his head at him, as though he really believes he's the one in the right. "So you've made inroads." 

In fact, Steve's been to a lot more protests than he'd ever tell Bucky about. Only he has the funny feeling Bucky knows about them now.

"Where'd you meet these guys?" Bucky asks, when Steve doesn't say anything.

"Around," Steve says. Bucky glares. "You hear things," Steve goes on. "In the market, at the butcher, wherever."

"You're going to those communism league things."

He is, but hell if he'll confirm it.

Something in the awful tension between them finally seems to bring Bucky to crack. "Steve," he croaks, shoulders falling hard. "Don't do this. Just stay home tonight, would you? This fight wasn't meant for you."

"Then who was it meant for?"

"The weak aren't supposed to protect the strong."

"Maybe they're not meant to, but they look out for their own when the strong don't bother."

Bucky blinks at him. "Is that a jab at me?"

"Well, Bucky, it's not a compliment."

" _Steve_. Come on. These guys don't fuck around."

"Answer my question. If it's not my fight, whose is it?" 

"They see you standing there, touting that propaganda—"

"That's the point of going in numbers."

"Numbers? _Twenty thousand_ versus _forty,_ Steve!"

"You'd make it thirty-nine? If no one stands up to them, they've already won! They'll have free reign! Now you answer me right now: if I don't stand up, _who the hell will_? If you don't have an answer—"

"It's not meant to be you," Bucky says loudly. "One look at you and they'll kill you for sport! You think these assholes are just playing around? They're _eugenicists_ , Steve, everyone knows what they think of punks like you!"

"Punks like me."

"You know as well as I do that you read like a fucking homosexual. And even if you didn't—"

But Bucky stops dead. At the look on Steve's face, his expression flickers with the kind of regret he rarely shows.

All Steve can hear is rushing in his ears. 

"Really?" he rasps.

"I didn't mean," Bucky says, but it's not clear what he didn't mean.

The pieces start to fall into place. "Is that why you prefer me to stay at home?" Steve asks meekly. "You think people will see me and figure out what you are?"

"Of _course_ not—"

"Waiting for me to get big so my wrists will fill out, are you? Is that the thing about the future you keep saying you can't do without?"

"Please don't—" 

"Think I'll finally pass enough for you when I'm six feet tall?"

"God, come on. You _know_ how I feel—"

But Steve shakes his head, not accepting a word of it. "If I'm such a punk, what does that make you, huh? Passing enough not to be concerned with what they want with fairies like me until you're strongarmed into it by a goddamned conscription notice?"

But now Steve's the one who's said too much. Even his own anger becomes eclipsed, the honesty of his words winding them both.

They stare at each other, sorry and raw. Bucky swallows, hard. His fingers creak around the keys in his hand.

"I just…" Steve runs a stressed hand through his hair. "I don't understand you. I don't understand what… I see you, and I think of the Bucky in the future, and I don't—"

Bucky flinches. "You'd compare me to him? Is that the asshole you want me to be?"

"I don't _want_ it for you, Bucky. I'd do anything to prevent it from happening. That's why I'm _going_ —"

"You're pushing for war."

" _No,_ Bucky. Not every fight is a war. I'm fighting to _prevent_ war; why the hell aren't you?"

"Because we're already at war! They are already at war. That's what I'm trying to _tell_ you, Steve. There's no point in protesting; there's no stopping them, stopping this. It's going to happen, it's going to—"

"And the people they're coming after? Don't they deserve to have someone show up for them?" Steve pauses to breathe. Bucky doesn't seem to have a response to that. "What are they supposed to hold onto over the coming years if no one gives them something to hope for? Goddamn you, Bucky—" Steve hits his fist against the nearest chair and it clatters against the table, then back onto the floor. "Why won't you show up? Just show up, for God's sake!"

Bucky grinds his teeth so hard Steve can hear it from where he stands. "If I go, will you stay?"

"I don't want to stay."

"Well that's too bad." He snatches the sign up. "Go back to bed."

"I said I'm not staying," Steve begins, but Bucky's got a fist buried in Steve's jacket and is pushing him back before he can snatch the sign back. "Bucky, _stop_ —"

"They don't get to take you!" Bucky shouts, turning to look at him, and Steve finally realizes what it is that's upset him. He hears the high pique of panic in Bucky's voice, sees the fear writ large in his eyes, and deflates at once where Bucky holds him. "Don't you understand? You're not meant for—they can't _have_ you, Steve. Why won't you just stay home?"

Steve just watches him, his mouth agape, until Bucky's fingers finally unclench from against his chest. Still, he doesn't pull back; he just stands there, palm flat against him, burning with tragedy.

"Is this... about the protest?" Steve asks him, slowly. He presses Bucky's hand against his own beating heart and watches the softening of Bucky's shoulders when he does. "Or is this about the war?" 

Bucky only stares at him, breathing hard, until finally he swallows and raises his chin in a poor show of bravery. That'll get him through the war, Steve thinks wildly. He'll be able to use that soon enough. "The only thing getting me through all of this," Bucky says quietly, forcing his voice steady, "is the thought of you being there on the other side. Without you… without you, Steve, I'm sunk." He shrugs, honest, and a little desperate too. "I don't know what else to tell you. They can't have you. You want to fuck me over, then going to this thing and getting yourself crucified is a real good way to make that happen."

"I don't want to fuck you over."

"Then please," Bucky says. His fingers dig into the fabric of Steve's coat again. "Please, Steve. Stay home."

Steve assesses him carefully, then steps to get close enough to press a careful hand against his chest, too. He holds Bucky's eye without saying a word, content just to feel the beat of his heart and the way it moves with him: warm and alive, whole and himself.

"I'm going," Steve says, quiet, and Bucky shuts his eyes and tilts his face to the floor. "You won't convince me to stay out of it. Not when I know what's at stake. Now I don't mind fighting for you if you're not ready—"

"Don't you fight for me."

"Well somebody has to, and you're not telling me who it's gonna be."

"Well, I guess it's gonna be us."

They stand there a moment, hands set against each other, staring into each other's determined gaze, until the pain set in Bucky's eyes tips Steve over from anger to compassion. He pulls at Bucky's collar until the sign's clattered to the floor and they're left holding at each other, strangely fanatical, as though the mere act of caring this much might be able to save them both.

"I want you healthy," Bucky murmurs. "That's all I meant. You gotta know—"

"I know," Steve says, though he knows Bucky meant the other things too. Their lips brush together and then they're kissing, careful at first and then frantic, terrified of all the things they're not telling the other—Steve, afraid of the Smithsonian plaque that said that Bucky died, of the way Bucky's arm, by his own admission, had first been given to him for "nefarious purposes"; Steve, afraid of the fact that Bucky told him once, drunk and not thinking straight, that he's going to be taken prisoner of war someday and how it's Steve who's supposedly going to get him out. 

Bucky, who believes and told him this, is still trying to talk him out of joining the war. Steve's afraid of that, too.

He shudders to think what Bucky is afraid of.

"Let's go to bed," Bucky mutters against his mouth, and then Steve remembers what he's afraid of after all.

"Not a chance," Steve replies, and he ducks fast away to grab the sign from off the floor.

Bucky blinks, then sighs at him and opens the door. "Let's go if we're going."

Steve doesn't need to be told twice.

  


  


  


### 1940

Bucky had gotten home at some ungodly hour and gathered Steve in his arms entirely, his breath sour with bootleg moonshine. Steve didn't ask questions. His body was flexible and warm, and when Bucky got like this it was better to lean _in._ He let Bucky take him in whatever way he wanted. Steve lives for moments like these—few moments in a year when Bucky loves him with absolute abandon, without concern for legality or inhibition or anything outside of the pair of them.

"Say you'll marry me one day," Bucky slurs against Steve's neck where he's got Steve pinned to the bed entirely, one of his hands holding Steve's crossed wrists above his head, the other buried in his hair. When Bucky moves his hips Steve throws his head back and moans long, helpless, and digs his heels hard against the small of Bucky's back. Bucky moans, too; he rolls his hips a couple more times like he can't help but to do it and Steve leans his face closer, wanting more of him, wanting all. 

"I want you," Bucky says, as though reading his mind. "I think about this, about you and me being forever, and it gets me through the day sometimes. Just tell me we'll find each other again, Steve, God, sweetheart, you're—" Another roll of his hips and Steve arches his back while Bucky dragging his mouth against Steve's neck, delirious. "Tell me you'll find me. Say that you will. No matter what I say, no matter what I do, tell me you'll track me down and make me yours."

"Buck—" 

"Promise me. Tell me we'll marry, when we can, when it's right. I just want you, Rogers, tell me we—"

"Yes," Steve gasps, "of course we will, Bucky, I—" and the rest is lost to the thrust of Bucky's hips and the hot grip of his fingers as he fucks them closer, closer to the edge.

  


  


  


### 1941

Bucky's sitting at the table, turning a telegram over in his fingers again and again when Steve gets home.

The bags fall out of Steve's hands. He doesn't need to be told what it says. "Oh."

Bucky's expression doesn't change. He holds the card between two fingers, like he's doing a magic trick. "Ship out in two weeks," he says, even.

That much is a surprise. Steve gapes, stepping forward. "Two _weeks_?"

"We knew it was soon."

"Not weeks! Bucky—we're not even at war!"

He shrugs. "Preparatory. Gotta shore up the ranks. Guess I scored well on their little test."

"Test? What... test?"

"IQ test of some kind. Made us all take 'em at work a few months ago."

" _What?_ "

"Expect to go to work and find full half of us are heading out." He shakes his head. "Whole generation gone all over again. Really makes you think, huh?"

Steve strides over and snatches the telegram from Bucky's fingers, hoping he's somehow misunderstood. But it's all there as Bucky said: he leaves in two weeks for training in Wisconsin.

Bucky waits patiently as he reads. He must see it when Steve's face falls. "We knew this was coming."

"Not this soon," Steve repeats. He can tell he's gone pale. "I thought we had—another year. Maybe two."

"It's not war. It's just Wisconsin."

"Same thing."

Bucky exhales, managing a shaky laugh. He touches his knuckle to Steve's cheek, then scans a thumb at the corner of his eye as though brushing something away. "What are you gonna do?" he asks, quiet.

Steve shakes his head, mouth going dry. Isn't he the one supposed to be asking that of Bucky? "I don't know."

"You should keep the place. I'll pay rent, upkeep; you don't need to worry about that."

"Don't be stupid. I don't need to live centrally, I can move south—"

"I'll want to be central when I come home."

"Then you can stay at your Ma's."

"I don't want to—Steve, let me do this."

"I don't need it. It's a waste."

Annoyance flickers in the corner of Bucky's eye. "Don't be stubborn."

"I'm being _practical_ —"

"Are you really gonna give up our home just because—"

His sentence cuts off with a twinge. Bucky swallows and looks to the ceiling, but Steve knows what he was going to say, can hear it echoing even so: _Just because I'm not coming back?_

The seconds tick by, the clock above the stovetop marking the slow dissolution of their remaining time.

"It's just Wisconsin," Bucky repeats.

"That's not even far." Steve throws the telegram onto the table and wipes angrily at his eyes. "Can't even get deployed properly, can you?"

"It's a conscription notice. I'm not even trained yet." Bucky pulls him in until he's seated in his lap, and they sit there a while in awful devotion. "Give me half a minute, would you?"

  


  


  


### 1942

Bucky's on a boat to England in two days' time, but they don't talk about it. It's in every moment they have left—in the way they hold close, in the way they look at the door as though waiting for something to stop him. But they don't talk about it. They can't. After all they've endured to get here, there's nothing left to say.

"We could still run," Steve murmurs anyway, when they're curled up in bed concertedly not talking.

Bucky's fingers grasp tight, immediate at Steve's wrist. "Don't," he whispers. "Not now. Please, I can't take it."

Steve gets up early the next morning, when Bucky's still asleep. He decides to try to enlist again. Jersey, this time. He gets rejected, again; that makes four. He comes back through Manhattan and watches buildings go by. He tries to remember anything from the future that might bring him solace—Bucky's careful silence; his unwillingness to leave Steve's side. It does nothing to help him, only makes him feel worse. 

He can't bring himself back to face Bucky's fear and desperation now. 

He goes to a movie, winds up in a fight. It was inevitable; he always would. He's all pent-up energy and exposed nerves, and Bucky rescues him, the way he always does. Steve looks up at him and sees the thing that Bucky's always feared: he's trained for it now, become it in spades. Bucky talks about tactics all matter-of-fact and Steve knows it's a warning. _This is who I am now_ , he's trying to say—already halfway to the man of war Steve had seen in the future before he's even crossed the pond.

Bucky must not be able to face Steve, either. He says he's found two dames for them to take out. He frames it as a night on the town, but it's really so they don't have to be alone. So they can pretend it's just another day. So they don't have to sit at home and be scared for each other.

Steve wanders off from the science fair and finds another enlistment camp, just in case.

It's funny, in a way, the ways Bucky tries to fight him. They both know what happens. They both know Steve submits to procedures of questionable ethics and that he gets big and pulls him out of some camp. They know they wind up in the future and find each other then, too.

He knows all this. But he still doesn't want Steve to enlist.

"You're really gonna do this again?" Bucky asks him, when he finds him standing in front of the camp.

"Well, it's a fair," Steve tells him. "Gonna try my luck."

Steve argues him down, instead of giving a proper goodbye—because it isn't one. He'll see him later.

Steve turns on his heel and walks in to enlist. Because, for once, he has something _worthwhile_ to prove.

  



End file.
